In the old days there were no weather forecasts, no weathermen on TV (no TV either) and no daily breakdown of weather and other meteorological issues on every newspaper and web site. I’m sure it does not shock you to learn that in the year 1,400 there were no web sites, no TV and no daily papers. However in parts of Europe there was this thing called the inquisition, which is nothing like weather forecasts.

People who believed (and everyone was forced to believe) had a very strong conviction that it was god who controlled the sky and the seas, it was god who decided if it will rain and therefore if it will be a good harvest year, or there will be storms, floods and heavy snow in winter. That was all god, and it had a very close link to human behavior, simply meaning that if you were good the weather would have turned out nicely for you, and if you were bad you should have prepared for a rough time.

Of course monotheistic religions borrowed the idea of weather and god from the pagans before them, they only thought that the idea of different gods taking care of different elements was ridiculous and somehow it was clear to them that’s its just one god who does everything.

See, in ancient times humans were afraid most of the time, from almost anything, because it meant trouble, disease and death. They did not have any way of telling if and when the sun would rise the next day, if it will snow in August and if night would not fall unexpectedly in the middle of the day for a few minutes. So there was some sense in developing an idea of naughty gods playing around with the weather, but today? when any 12 year old can see what the weather would be like? (well, not exactly how it will be like, but most of the time).

And somehow this not only escapes the minds of believers everywhere, it is so natural for them that today, using science, we can easily predict the weather, that believers have just shifted from the god who controls rains to something a little more dramatic, the god who controls earthquakes and hurricanes, and if one day science will discover a way to predict those they will probably move to another thing.

In the last few weeks it has become clear that this world, with all its nations and peoples, is carefully stopping human progress and starting to fall back, with a clear purpose and conscience the leaders of this world do not believe in pushing the envelop, they prefer to deal with the banal and insane instead.

And so, our last superpower, the last nation on earth that could say it has done for humanity and for human progress more than any other in the recent decades, is now shutting down its NASA space program, its universities are seeking – and receiving funding by the millions from oil rich countries in the middle east so they will, at least at pretense, seem to be joining hands in a pro Islam and anti Israel campaign, and that can not solve its increasingly worrying economic problems with substantial resolve.

Our main economic superpower (China) can say nothing about contribution to human progress (maybe some effort for the Olympics can count), and any past contribution is made to look ridiculous by the middle ages approach to human rights and human decency, a country that is an economic giant but has millions working in semi slavery conditions, with poor health systems and an increasing ruthlessness towards any criticism, political or artistically.

A world in which a former superpower (Russia) is putting in all its weight to block a UN move against a country that is now, as these lines are being written, executing dozens of its citizens, where rivers run red from the hundreds of bodies that are filling it, and where tanks and artillery are used against unarmed population in order to have them submit to the rule of the current power.

Instead of reaching out to space, understanding our role in this universe and studying more about the origins of life the USA is now focusing on how to defend itself from enemies who believe that their god wants them to slaughter anyone who does not believe in him/her/it, instead of China getting on with human progress and respect for its citizens it is contemplating the situation of a nuclear Asia, and the terror of Chineese muslims in Xinjiang, and Russia, who has become the new ultra capitalist player in the world is more worried about the payments from Iran for the nuclear installations than the huge gap between rich and poor.

This is the world we all live in, only now it is moving backwards instead of forward, and no one even tries to hide it.

One of the things that non believers, agnostics and atheists need to confront many times when discussing religion and beliefs is the questions about god, “do you not believe that god really exists?” is one common question. However you will find that many believers do not really have a clear picture of god (not in an abstract way) and do not know what to expect of that god, not in terms of reward or punishment, and not in terms of characteristics it might have.

If you would have the misfortune of being a Jewish person living in Spain about 500 years ago, your tormentors would have told you that all that burning of the flesh and cutting of limbs and stretching of bones is done with express permission from their god, and it was ultimately in your favor to suffer those. According to most of the writings of the time God in the 1,400s’ has nothing to do with love, its all about fanaticism and exclusivity, zero tolerance for anything which is not his disciples single version of religion.

In European wars, up until the second world war, god was frequent in appearing for the true side favor, only that the Nazis had sworn by their god, and the allies by theirs. For a Nazi soldier in the war, murdering Jewish infants or executing a handicap, or burning a gay person could have been morally wrong, but not religiously wrong, since the church was very clear in it being in favor of Hitler’s thinking.

The closer you get to modern times you will find that the Christian (and Jewish) God becomes much more relaxed, less angry and less intimidating. Now you can find even religious Jews that would tell you that being gay is alright by god, as well as Christians who will tell you that slavery is not accepted by Christianity (what a difference one hundred years can make). You could, however, turn to the “good book” at any time and show them how much god likes slavery, and how busy it was with the thought of slavery that a whole manual for slave owners is included with every copy of the bible. Homosexuality is explicitly marked out as a sin in Jewish belief, and it is only that this modern form of believers have adapted a “do nothing about it” policy.

So God used to be angry, bloodthirsty and incredibly violent, however in the last two hundred years its priests and ministers are telling us we got it all wrong, and that in fact god is love and acceptance, well, tell that to the hundreds of thousands of people your colleagues burned an tortured, the children that were murdered in the name of that same god. And if God is ever changing, and if we can not really know its nature, we can assume – with the highest degree of clarity, that this God does not care about anything that happens to us, since in all the atrocities committed in written history there was one event in which God presented itself and put an end to human misery, on the contrary, God was always there, on the side of the criminals, justifying every blood drop that took.

The connection between god and men is a strange and puzzling, why would the supreme creator of everything obsessively ask and demand respect from its creatures, as well as monitor their every move, in the kitchen, in the streets and in the bedrooms?

It seems to me that its has something to do with the evolution of man-made gods, or actually with the development of the idea of god itself. In the ancient times there were many gods, and people followed the ones they liked, like twitter – only for gods instead of people. They needed to show their love to their gods if they wanted any help, which made sense to them at the time due to the very human nature of gods. So gods were angry and jealous, they were fearful or greedy, they were like men, and if you wanted them on your side you needed to play nice.

The Greeks took it a step forward, not only improving the myth around gods but putting order to the whole thing, arranging a wide range of personal gods under the same discipline, which meant that you had less a chance to offend anyone by following a certain god, since they were all now cooperated. The Romans followed, keeping all along the idea that gods are like humans, only stronger, and that they have needs just like any of us. In fact they needed humans to worship them in order to keep their powers, they needed people to believe in them.

And then the almighty one god appeared, shaking off all the semi gods on the way, but retaining the idea that god needs people to be a god, and that it needs constant attnetion and praise, even though it is a perfect being, still needs attention… shame really.

God is so painfully man made, and so evidently flawed, that only the ones that are stuck in the dogma fail to see the light of truth, if you are a believer you are in a room without windows, believing that you are in a constant night, and you keep being nice to something that needs you to be nice – now that can not be godly.

Please, we have burning issues all around us, from politicians who sell us to corporates to poverty and hunger on a monstrous scale, that we need to focus on now and on the real priorities of our race, investing one second on something that is not there and never was there is preventing us from dealing with the real, terrifying, issues.